Countdown begins to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s tour of Australia and New Zealand

The inventor of the World Wide Web is to touch down on Australians soil on 27 January, his first visit to the country in 15 years.

The Briton’s five-city tour, including Wellington in New Zealand, is the result initially of an invitation to Sir Tim to be the keynote presenter at this year’s linux.conf.au event.

Sir Tim’s first public engagement is at Te Papa Museum in Wellington on 30 January. On 1 February, Sir Tim will deliver the keynote address at the linux.conf.au event in Canberra, where he will discuss technical aspects of open data and the Web. A public lecture, scheduled for 31 January in Canberra, has now been merged with the Linux conference, organisers said.

On 2 February, he will be in Gold Coast to deliver a public lecture at Griffith University. The event is being held in partnership with Gold Coast City Council and Regional Development Australia.

Sir Tim then travels to Melbourne where he will lecture at the University of Melbourne on 4 February. An informal Melbourne-based linked data hackfest is scheduled for the same day.

He then signs off with a public lecture at the Sydney Town Hall on 5 February. The event s being hosted in partnership with UTSpotlight 2013. Also scheduled are a couple of private events – at CSIRO and the University of New South Wales.

The first round of ticket sales for many events has been sold out. Please check out Sir Tim’s detailed itinerary and information about ticket sales and availability here.

The TBL Down Under Tour, as it is called, is coordinated in Australia by Pia Waugh (Open Government Expert) and Jan Bryson (Partner&Prosper), in collaboration with Celebrity Speakers Ltd. Support for the non-profit tour has come from iiNet and a number of consortium and private sponsors.

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